Executive summary

The first five years of a child’s life can be a period of great opportunity, and great vulnerability. Children learn at a faster rate than at any other time in their lives, building the foundations for their future cognitive and social-emotional skills development. Building advanced cognitive and social-emotional skills is far more difficult and less effective at later ages without a strong early foundation. Education systems that wish to achieve a step-change in student outcomes are well advised to increase their focus on the quality, responsiveness and effectiveness of their early years policies for children.

The International Early Learning and Child Well-being study (IELS) puts a spotlight on how children are faring at five years of age. The study directly measures key indicators of children’s learning, as well as collecting a broad range of developmental and contextual information from children’s parents and teachers. The study does not attempt to measure everything. Instead, it focuses on those aspects of development and learning that are predictive of children’s later education outcomes and wider well-being. These are: emergent literacy and numeracy, self-regulation, and social-emotional skills. Across these four early learning domains, a total of ten dimensions of children’s development and learning were included in the study.

Estonia participated in this study with two other OECD countries: England (United Kingdom) and the United States. Each of these countries recognises children’s early years as critical to children’s later learning and well-being. Each country participated in this study to enhance the body of international evidence available to policy makers, education leaders and practitioners, and parents to improve children’s early learning outcomes. The information from the study provides each country with insights to inform their approaches to children’s early years and their approaches in the early years of schooling. This report presents the findings of the study for Estonia.

Main findings

Children in Estonia have particularly strong self-regulation and social-emotional skills in addition to sound levels of literacy and numeracy

Children in Estonia showed comparatively stronger early self-regulation and social-emotional skills than children in England and the United States. At the same time, children in Estonia were at or close to the overall averages for emergent literacy and numeracy skills. Children in Estonia scored significantly higher than children in England and the United States in identifying others’ emotions and prosocial behaviour. They also scored significantly higher than children in the United States in emergent literacy, numeracy, working memory and mental flexibility, and significantly higher than children in England on their capacity to inhibit impulse responses. However, children in Estonia scored significantly lower than children in the United States and England in non-disruptive behaviour, and lower than children in England in emergent numeracy.

Differences between children based on socio-economic background are smaller in Estonia than in England or the United States

The combination of household income and parental and education levels – which together create the socio-economic index applied in this study – were associated with higher emergent literacy, numeracy, working memory, mental flexibility, emotion identification, prosocial behaviour and trust. However, relationships between early learning skills and socio-economic background were comparatively smaller in Estonia than in England or the United States. Additionally, the association between socio-economic background and early learning skills was not significant in inhibition, emotion attribution and disruptive behaviour in Estonia.

Early learning among Russian-speaking children, especially girls, is stronger than among Estonian-speaking children, despite coming from lower socio-economic backgrounds

Russian-speaking children had significantly higher outcomes than Estonian-speaking children in emergent literacy, numeracy, working memory, emotion identification, emotion attribution, prosocial behaviour and trust, after controlling for socio-economic status. These differences were more prominent after accounting for socio-economic status than before. In Estonia, there was an overall gender gap in favour of girls in emergent literacy, self-regulation skills and social-emotional skills, but there was no equivalent gender gap for emergent numeracy skills. This result is in line with the patterns observed in England and the United States. However, in Estonia, Russian-speaking children showed more prominent gender differences than Estonian-speaking children.

Children’s early learning relies on the interrelated development of cognitive and social-emotional skills

While the positive association between socio-economic status and early learning outcomes varied across countries, the positive association of social-emotional skills with other early learning outcomes was relatively stable. In Estonia, the percentage of variation in emergent literacy explained by social-emotional scores was between 5% and 27% (compared to 13-33% in England and the United States), between 6% and 26% for numeracy scores (compared to 12-28% in England and 7-22% in the United States), and between 4% and 11% for working memory scores (compared to 7-18% in England and 5-22% in the United States), after controlling for socio-economic status.

A variety of activities within and outside the home best support children’s early learning, and moderation is sometimes best.

Regardless of socio-economic background, the number of children’s book at home and the frequency with which children were read to by their parents were significantly related to cognitive and social-emotional outcomes. Similarly, regularly taking children to special activities outside of the home (such as sports, dance lessons, scouts) was positively associated with both children’s cognitive and social-emotional skills. Some activities were more strongly associated with particular skills than others. For example, regular role-playing with parents was positively associated with less disruptive behaviour but less so with children’s emergent literacy, numeracy or self-regulation skills.

Nevertheless, more is not always better. There were positive associations between the use of digital devices and self-regulation outcomes, but negative associations with levels of trust. At the same time, children who used devices weekly rather than daily had higher scores in some early learning domains, pointing towards moderate rather than frequent use of digital devices.